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Talk:Assault Rifle (XCOM: Enemy Unknown)
Trivia The first trivia bit is a little misleading (I understand that it is speculations anyway). Firstly, weapons in game are all cartoonish in their sizes, as are human hands and other objects. Furthermore, if one was to speculate about conventional weapons chosen to equip X-COM soldiers, it would definitely not be small-caliber, high-velocity rounds like 5.56 NATO that M4 carbine is chambered for. These were adopted as standard issue military rounds that are merely adequate in penetration and, more importantly, solve a lot of logistical problems as well as shortcomings of drafted, or mass recruited, infantry. X-COM doesn't really have these problems... but it does have a problem with penetration. Thus, any selective fire rifle chosen for use by X-COM operators would be chambered for full-size rifle rounds like 7.62x51 – at the very least. Or maybe even for larger caliber either/or more high-velocity rounds, like .338 Lapua Magnum or any other purpose-designed round. Considering X-COM snipers have to fire something akin to .50 BMG from the shoulder, supports and assaults would surely put up with bulk/weight/recoil too, just to get a chance to knock through the aliens' armor. The oversized magazine, spent cartidge cases and barrel (even accounting for cartoon proportions) seem to support this hypothesis, as well as the exagerrated recoil fitting for a "battle rifle", and relatively low accuracy of auto fire. After all, if you think about it, X-COM soldiers operate near and beyond the limits of human capabilities: it starts with running around in armor firing high-caliber guns that can break a clavicle, and only gets worse with carrying gatling guns and plasma accelerators that weigh in the dozens of kilograms (as hinted in the descriptions, where a simple plasma rifle is specifically mentioned as "so light, it's comfortable to shoot!"). Truly, the need to take down armored aliens would be very fresh and interesting problem for a firearms designer. All the priorities and rules would fly out of the window (and hopefully hit a sectoid on the head). Meaning that if a foe requires dozens of well-placed shots to take down, monster guns and novelties stop being anti-materiel and become anti-personnel. BTW, the same happened in the beginning of WWII, with anti-tank rifles, especially on Eastern Front. Untterly unpractical in every way, insanely cumbersome and heavy, but absolutely essential and strategically precious. It's the same, really: if you only have 4 men against a tank / alien, they can either become red blotches on the ground (without AT rifle / high-caliber "conventional weapons" in XCOM) or actually kill the tank on their own. Later armor became too thick, of course, and then they researched beam... I mean, HEAT warheads. EXALT Weaponry I took a glance at the page, and then I realized we don't have anything on EXALT Weaponry, anywhere. We need to include that info on XCOM weapon pages. - MA4585159 (talk) 10:54, October 3, 2015 (UTC) Where it is stated that it uses 5,56mm munition? This trivia should be removed. Also if anything, it resembles a bulked up Mk.17 assault rifle, and not a ACR to me.